Romantic Circles Blog

Britain and Greece have marked their roughly two hundred-year stalemate surrounding the ownership of the Elgin Marbles with a new salvo. The occassion: the June 20 opening of the new $200 million, 260,000 square foot Acropolis Museum in Athens. The museum’s opening can be seen as a rebuttal to claims by the British Museum, which holds more than half of the frieze’s total length, that Greece did not have a sufficient space to keep them. Indeed, Claire Soares of  The Independent sees this massive undertaking as a very deliberate demonstration of Greece’s ability to keep the frieze safe:  “Unlike any other museum in the world, it was designed to house something it didn’t own.”

The gaps in the Greek collection are completed with plaster casts of the originals, made to look by some reports conspicuous in their artificiality. As Sean Newsom of The Times of London argued recently , “We can argue all we like about how we saved the sculpture from years of turmoil in Greece, but with this room finally completed, it’s obvious where they now belong.”

Though no permanent loan requests or bequeathals seem to be in the offing, Greek officials have taken on a triumphal tone. The inevitable, it seems, has finally come, according to Greek Culture Minister Antonio Samaras: “For 200 years, the Parthenon Marbles have been amputated, now they must be reunited. The Parthenon frieze speaks through its totality; this voice should be heard not be silenced,”

Numerous other commentators have chimed in on Greece’s behalf–among them Christopher Hitchens and Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times. Compare these with responses from the Romantic period by Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, among others. The striking thing, even with the opening of the new museum, is how little the debate has changed.

The Romantic period is proving to be fertile ground for one of this year’s chicest fictional genres: monster lit. The newest offering, Laurie Scheck’s A Monster’s Notes, attempts to take the genre to a new level, jettisoning zombies for a love story between a Frankenstein’s monster and an eight-year-old Mary Shelley. According to its publisher’s description and word around the Web, the novel promises to offer a metacommentary upon both the original novel it draws from and the burgeoning genre that has given rise to hideous progeny like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (see previous post). One NPR commentator described A Monster’s Notes as a novel  “for people who care about the Pride and Prejudice side of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

Taking Frankenstein as its Ur-text, the novel asks a serious of tantalizing “what ifs”:

What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?

It appears the novel shares some affinities with Shelley Jackson’s classic hypertext Patchwork Girl, both of which imagine face-to-face meetings between the creature and Mary Shelley and which project the creature into a postmodern world. Described by the publisher as a “genre bending book,” a monster’s tale purports to blend historical fiction, science fiction, romance, and monster lit into “a meditation on creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and beauty, and on our need to be understood.” Certainly, like Jackson’s hypertext, hybridity promises to be a key theme.

A Monster’s Notes hits bookshelves June 23.

See also our previous post on John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus,” a nominee for the best novelette category at this year’s Hugo Awards (science fiction). It chronicles a meeting between Pride and Prejudice‘s bookish Mary Bennet and Frankenstein’s namesake.

An article in today’s Boston Globe online suggests that Romantic era science helped establish modern medicine’s conception of pain. But perhaps emblematically, it wasn’t until a slightly later moment that medical researchers–and the culture at large–realized that what could increase pleasure could also curtail pain. Citing a watershed experiment with nitrous oxide at Massachussets General Hospital in 1846 as the turning point in society’s perception of pain management, author Mike Jay flashes back to the experiments of Thomas Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institute at the turn of the nineteenth century, describing them as near misses  in the realization of nitrous oxide’s anesthetic potential. The problem, it seems, is that the men Beddoes tapped to huff the gas–among them Coleridge, Southey, and Humphry Davy–were more interested in the high:

The experiments, as they unfolded, led the researchers away from any notion they might have had about pain relief. Most of the subjects responded not by losing consciousness, but by leaping around the lab, dancing, shouting, and possessed by poetic epiphanies.

Still, writes Jay, even this rage for pleasure would eventually lead to a new outlook on pain:

The Pneumatic Institution’s curiosity about the mind-altering properties of the gas, and particularly its “sublime” effects on the imagination, were emblematic of the Romantic sensibility of its participants, and their search for a language to map their inner worlds. This sensibility, as it spread, would play an important role in transforming attitudes to pain, but its early adopters still held the social attitudes of their time. Davy believed that “a firm mind might endure in silence any degree of pain,” and regarded his frequent cuts, burns, and laboratory misadventures as heroic badges of pride. Coleridge, by contrast, was acutely and often morbidly sensitive to pain, but he perceived this sensitivity as a moral weakness and blamed it for his shameful and agonizing dependency on opium.

Ultimately, writes Jay, the “new sensibilities” of a “more genteel and compassionate society” (read: Victorian) would turn the focus from pleasure and guilt to the amelioration of pain. Presumably adapted from Jay’s recent book, The Atmosphere of Heaven (Yale UP, 2009), the article goes on to discuss in detail the changing cultural and medicinal viewpoints on pain, charting a general trajectory from a religious notion of pain as a necessary for the preservation of life to a more secular fascination with pain management as a marvel of medical technology. Given that the centerpiece of Jay’s book is the intellectual circle surrounding Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institute, one might expect it to offer an even more nuanced take on the beginning of the end for pain.

Read the full article here.

Lisa Spiro of the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog recently cited Romantic Circles as an exemplary “online community” for its long-standing devotion to diverse scholarly pursuits in a digital environment.  Her post addresses the relative dearth of collaborative work in the humanities as compared to the sciences but also points to the digital humanities as a rich source of  collaborative work, of which Romantic Circles is just one example.  Spiro’s post is extensive and collects concrete examples of collaborative digital humanities projects–from crowdsourcing to content aggregation to gaming.

We are very pleased to announce that the new Romantic Circles Reviews site has launched!  While the entirety of our reviews archive is of course accessible at this new url, we’ve changed the back end of our site along with the front end, allowing us to streamline the production process: our hope is to address scholarly conversations in as close to real-time as possible, publishing reviews of the books of today, rather than those of 2004.  Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing very new reviews, as well as clearing out some of the older backlog of reviews — it should be an exciting time!

Under the new editorship of Jasper Cragwall, we’re publishing two fresh reviews: Julia Carlson, reviewing Ron Broglio’s Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750-1830 (Bucknell UP, 2008); and Dennis Low, reviewing Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge’s Collected Poems (Fyfield Books / Carcanet, 2007).  Please join us at http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/reviews-blog/.

Apropos of our recent post on the zombified rewrite of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a selection for this year’s prestigious Hugo Awards (science fiction) endeavors to write Frankenstein into Austen’s novel–or vice versa. Up for the best novelette category, John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus” chronicles a meeting between Pride‘s bookish Mary Bennet and Frankenstein‘s namesake. One short fan review/reading finds it a worthy selection for its deft metafictional play but has qualms about it’s voice: “[Kessel's] pastiche rings hollow, emulating Austen’s grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure but lacking the spark that imbued her writing with so much humor.” Luckily, those who are interested can decide for themselves by downloading the pdf from the author’s Web site.

The award winners will be announced in August at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Montreal, Quebec.

It seems worth noting, in the vein of our recent Coraline post, some of the Romantic ties to Watchmen, the superhero movie that has been quite visible since its debut earlier this month. The film is based on the 1986 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Its trailer is below:

Though familiar with the work in its comic book form, this blogger has not yet seen the film. Reviews are mixed. Roger Ebert spoke well of it, while The New York Times’ A.O. Scott is somewhat more nonplussed. Alan Moore, the writer of the source comic book, has disowned the film sight unseen.

One of the story’s central characters in both media is Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias. In his superhero incarnation, Ozymandias is a superior physical and mental specimen, having traced the path of Alexander the Great’s conquest and learned the spiritual and physical disciplines native to those areas. After a law passed banning superheroes in the 1970s, Veidt publicly revealed his secret identity, and turned his alter ego into a successful line of products and services. As the murder mystery that launches the film unfolds (from here there are spoilers, for those so concerned), Veidt is exposed by the film’s other heroes as the mastermind behind a vast conspiracy to simultaneously undermine the former superhero community and to unite a world on the brink of nuclear war around a common — though manufactured — enemy for the good of mankind.

In the comic book, Moore makes little reference to Shelley’s eponymous poem until the end of the penultimate issue (titled “Look On My Works, Ye Mighty…”) when Veidt’s plot is revealed. In the final panel, the epigraph is a slightly longer quotation from Shelley that includes this post’s title, with proper attribution. Much of the rest of the time, Ozymandias’s Egyptian connections are given the spotlight, rather than Shelley, perhaps hoping to keep association with works that would cause despair latent in the reader’s mind rather than explicit.

Elsewhere in the comic (and absent from the movie in its theatrical form, by all accounts) is the metatextual and fictional Tales of the Black Freighter comic book, which seems to be influenced by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as much as by its acknowledged sources, 1950s EC comics and Brecht’s pirate ship from Threepenny Opera. The panels of the comic-within-a-comic are interpolated such that the twin tragic endings come at much the same time. In the story, (much of which is told in the sixth issue, “Fearful Symmetry,” which ends with a longer Blake epigraph) a sailor whose shipmates have been slaughtered by the pirate crew of the Black Freighter makes a raft of their bodies to try to get back to his hometown to warn them of the coming pirate plague. His time on the sea is punctuated by the killing and eating of a seagull, his hallucinated conversations with his dead crewmembers, and an encounter with a giant shark reminiscent of John Singleton Copley’s Romantic-era Watson and the Shark. When he arrives, he finds to his horror that he’s misunderstood; there has been no pirate invasion of his hometown, and he himself is the real monster.

Moore’s work beyond Watchmen is no stranger to Romantic figures either: Blake is referenced in Moore’s V for Vendetta, and appears as a character in his From Hell. Moore also wrote and performed a full length spoken-word piece about Blake at the Tate Gallery in 2001 called Angel Passage (it was released on CD in 2002, but is now out of print). Another spoken word piece, Highbury Working, features a mediation on a late-in-life Coleridge’s opium dream of Sara Hutchinson (which is also on CD, and out of print).

An announcement from the editors at the Blake Archive:

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of Milton a Poem copy B.  There are only four copies of Milton, Blake’s most personal epic. Copy B, from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, joins copy A, from the British Museum, and copy C, from the New York Public Library, previously published in the Archive.

Blake etched forty-five plates for Milton in relief, with some full-page designs in white-line etching, between c. 1804 (the date on the title page) and c. 1810. Six additional plates (a-f) were probably etched in subsequent years up to 1818. No copy contains all fifty-one plates. The prose “Preface” (plate 2) appears only in copies A and B. Plates a-e appear only in copies C and D, plate f only in copy D. The first printing, late in 1810 or early in 1811, produced copies A-C, printed in black ink and finished in water colors. Blake retained copy C and added new plates and rearranged others at least twice; copy C was not finished until c. 1821. Copy D was printed in 1818 in orange ink and elaborately colored. The Archive will publish an electronic edition of copy D in the near future.

Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of Milton copy B are fully searchable and are supported by our Inote and ImageSizer applications. With the Archive’s Compare feature, users can easily juxtapose multiple impressions of any plate across the different copies of this or any of the other illuminated books. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to all copies of Milton in the Archive.

With the publication of Milton copy B, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of sixty-eight copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, sketches, and water color drawings, including Blake’s illustrations to Thomas Gray‘s Poems, water color and engraved illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the large color printed drawings of 1795 and c. 1805, the Linnell and Butts sets of the Book of Job water colors and the sketchbook containing drawings for the engraved illustrations to the Book of Job, the water color illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave, and all nine of Blake’s water color series illustrating the poetry of John Milton.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

A new stop-motion animation film based on a story by Neil Gaiman offers a slightly more than passing allusion to Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas), Coraline follows a young girl neglected and ignored by her parents into a parallel world (discovered through a small door in the old mansion into which they’ve recently moved) that contains a set of “other” parents, led by the mother, who have mastered the art of wish-fulfillment. The only difference between the real world and the alternate one: the characters in the latter have buttons sewn over their eyes, marking them as automota of a sort. As the “other mother” begins to ply Coraline with goodies and entertainments, it quickly becomes clear that the former has devious plans for Coraline. And it is not long before the “other mother” gives Coraline an ultimatum: to remain in this happy world, she must abandon her real parents and agree to have buttons sewn over her eyes, like the rest of the characters in the parallel world.

Coraline’s immediate rejection of this proposal unmasks the “other mother” as the sinister, manipulative “Belle Dame” she is. The latter name is given the mother by the ghosts of three children she has previously goaded into her world and subsequently locked away for eternity. A sustained meditation of Keats’ poem this movie is not. But it does contain an interesting take on the poem’s themes of seduction,  economy of exchange (highlighted by the Merci / Mercy pun in the title), the danger of dreams, the abomination of  love, and, most importantly,  the enslavement of the seductress’ victims in a state of perpetual, ghostly death-in-life.  Most conspicuously absent, as might be expected, is the theme of sexual seduction in Keats’ poem; the abomination of love in the movie is of the motherly kind. Absent the sexual politics (that makes possible an empowered reading of the Belle Dame in Keats’ poem), the “other mother” of the movie is thoroughly villainous. What’s more, the dominating visual imagery of the film is that of dolls and puppetry, something Keats poem only addresses by analogy.

For reasons entirely other than its debts to Keats, the film has received mostly favorable reviews, and if that’s not enough, it is projected in stereoscopic 3D! (But not, unfortunately, at this blogger’s theater.)

It seems Jane Austen-ites are abuzz with a new book, titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!, that turns Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, et al into zombie killers.  According to an article in today’s Times, the novel retains about 85 percent of Austen’s words, twisting them to fit the zany context. Hence Austen’s famous first line reads, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

According to the publisher’s description, the novel is a “delightful comedy of manners” accentuated with plenty of “bone-crunching zombie action”:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

The novel is slated to come out in April.

The book also got some play on the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me this week during the “Bluff the Listener” segment, in which a listener was tasked to choose which of three stories about classic works of literature being “improved” was true. Listen here.

This story is already all over the blogosphere, so here are just  a couple examples of what others are saying about this spoof:

Austenprose

A Bloggering Hole